Generational Market Research is a Scam
How much do members of the “Millennial generation”, “Gen Z”, or the next one – “Gen Alpha” – really have in common? Not much according to social scientific research. Most generational labels are spun around a fixed yet randomly composed cluster of birth cohorts spanning around 15 years – not collectively gained experiences or decisive historical events that might have socioculturally shaped people’s attitudes and practices during that time. In fact, the only thing they do share is that they don’t even exist as meaningful social entities. So why do market researchers and think tanks keep pushing arbitrary generational labels, while corporations are gladly investing their valuable marketing budgets in questionable customer segmentation on GenZ?
This article investigates how generational market research has slowly turned into a scam since the original inception of the “teenage consumer”. In the last decades, so-called experts have made it a lucrative business to proclaim generational differences, heralding the emergence of new birth cohorts-specific generations at faster and faster intervals. This business has conjured up an artificial generational warfare that mostly takes place in the click-hungry world of digital media.
Instead of perpetuating a flawed birth cohorts-based generational model, we offer a social theory-grounded alternative – a collective experience-based approach to reconstructing generations. It is in this way that the concept of generations becomes helpful again in making sense of the human condition in light of time, age, and historical development.
What’s wrong with generational labeling and market research?
First off, there is nothing wrong with wanting to understand differences in attitude, values, and practice between different age groups. Let’s just not pretend that they should be sliced and typologized the way they are right now, since they are not managing to capture real existing collectivities of people.
There is not even any empirical evidence that it is competitively advantageous for companies to actually craft their consumer or employee strategies around a birth cohort-dependent segmentation into “Baby Boomers”, “Gen X”, “Gen Y/Millennials”, “Gen Z”, “Gen Alpha”, and whatever will follow next.
These generational labels are deeply flawed, and there is a growing body of criticism by academics and some journalists who call for an end to their usage. For instance, a group of sociologists published an open letter to Pew Research Center, complaining about their “arbitrary and counterproductive” generation label research (Cohen, 2021, May 26). The Atlantic Monthly titled “‘Gen Z’ only exists in your head” (Pinsker, 2021, October 14). The New Yorker called, “It’s time to stop talking about ‘generations’” since “from boomers to zoomers, the concept gets social history all wrong” (Menand, 2021, October 18). And a group of industrial psychologists stated in a recent generation myth-debunking meta study:
“The theoretical assumptions upon which generational research is based have been questioned and there is little empirical evidence that generations exist, that people can be reliably classified into generational groups, and, importantly, that there are demonstrable differences between such groups that manifest and affect various work-related processes” (Rudolph et al., 2021, p. 945).
Overall, the current model of birth-cohort specific generations can be criticized on the following terms:
Arbitrary misappropriation of a biological model
In the current model, the biological concept of generation was ported over to the social dimension, without actually managing to capture how groups of people experience the world in similar terms and are shaped by decisive historical events. These generational labels cluster adjacent birth-cohorts that span around 15 years. The time frame of who's included in a specific generation remains fixed, applying cut-off dates of who is included and excluded, which are not grounded in what is happening in the social world around these people.
The “baby boomer” generation was the only one in recent memory derived from an actual historical event with a demographic impact – the post-World-War-2 baby boom. It denotes those born between the early 1940s through the early 1960s, following a great catastrophe in the shape of a world war. “Generation X”, however, does not refer to a historical event. It just follows the same positivistic birth cohort logic built around a single demographic marker. It applies random cut-off dates, incorporating all of those people who happen to have been born between 1965-1980. These individuals have been classified and reclassified over the years, and have been the "MTV Generation" and the “Me Generation", before being returned to "Generation X". Likewise, the term “Generation Y” or “Millennials” continues with this logic, referring to those born between 1981-1996. And “Generation Z” identifies those born around 1997-2010 (cf. Twenge, 2018, January 26).
These cut-off dates are random because, biologically speaking, a human generation should span the average age difference between parents and their children – that is 25-30 years in the industrialized West, not just 15 years. Surprisingly, the cut-off lengths of generational labels have even gotten shorter in the last couple of years. Marketers are proclaiming the emergence of a new generation at shorter intervals, while people become parents at a later stage in life in many modern societies, thus actually increasing the age difference to their children (Cohen, 2021, May 26).
For social scientific purposes of understanding how people make sense of the world, even the biological idea that a “new generation” is established every 30 years doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t add any value as a model trying to explain social phenomena like collective differences in attitude, values, and practice.
Monolithic and ignorant of life stages
Most formulations of generational labels frame their members as monolithic, homogenous entities with a temporally fixed mindset. They pretend that generational traits remain the same and are not subject to change over time. They rarely provide longitudinal insights into life stage-specific human maturation over the course of time.
It goes without saying that young people who are currently going through primary and secondary socialization have a different perspective on the world than those who enter retirement age. They do not only have access to different personally experienced time horizons; they are at different life stages in their personal development. In consequence, a young person – regardless of generational membership – will always have a different perspective on life, their role in the world, the past, the future, risk, and opportunity than someone at the end of their life.
Stereotypical with little empirical evidence
The biggest gripe critics of current generational labels and the underlying “research” have is that it is not supported by actual empirical evidence. Instead, these purported generational differences are mostly relying on stereotypical beliefs that perpetuate conflict and agism (King et al., 2019, August 1). In consequence, proclamations of differences and commonalities between “Gen Y”, “Gen Z”, etc. are mostly meaningless. They tell us very little about the ways older and younger people actually perceive and act in this social world.
Lack of identification with generational labels
Who do you know who actually identifies as a “baby boomer” or a “millennial”? To whom described by these labels are these classifications meaningful in their day-to-day life or when reflecting upon their existence within society? Unless you’re a market researcher trying to sell a customer segmentation project or a journalist preparing some clickbait article, these generational models are so filled with clichés that they offer very little meat for collective identification. Even the “OK Boomer” TikTok trend emerged as a butthurt response to an artificial media discourse that was about a general conflict between young and old – not specific generations.
While these labels try to divide people into “us” and “them” based on age, they certainly do not manage to capture that often-proclaimed “shared generational consciousness”. A Pew Research Center study even revealed that regular people are terrible at self-categorizing into established generational labels, associating with the “wrong” birth cohorts (Cohen, 2021, July 7).
Ethnocentric and ignorant of different cultural contexts
The currently popular generational classification into “Baby Boomer”, “Gen X”, “Gen Y/Millennials”, and “Gen Z” stems from a predominantly Anglo-American discourse, as we will explain later. These labels were pushed by US and UK companies and authors at particular points in the past. However, in an increasingly globalized economy, they’ve risen to international fame and see universal application. For example, studies and articles in Germany use these labels (e.g. Deloitte, 2022; von Cranach, 2021, September 14), as do they in South Africa (e.g. Actuarial Society of South Africa, 2018; Shanton et al., 2020; Kruger & Viljoen, 2022).
Unfortunately, these labels do not reflect the different political, social, and economic developments these countries underwent since World War 2, which spawned different cultural, and circumstantial realities for the people they’re claiming to represent. Consumer-oriented generational models that follow the Anglo-American labels generally like to highlight, e.g., the invention of the internet or the impact of the iPod (see e.g. Twenge, 2017). Much market research that claims to represent “Baby Boomers”, “Gen X”, “Millennials”, or “Gen Z” rarely provides a contextual understanding grounded in history and sociocultural development beyond US-based commonplaces (cf. Rudolph et al., 2021).
Discourses and cultural exchange have certainly become extremely globalized thanks to the internet, digital media channels, and English as the quasi-lingua franca. But the idea of a thoroughly “global teenager” is something we still mostly know from foresight expert Peter Schwartz’s (1996, p. 118) scenario building exercises. Universal generational labels do rarely account for holistically transformational events like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the end of Apartheid that thoroughly affect the lives of particular societies in different ways than those inhabiting other cultural contexts.
That’s also the reason why some critical authors are starting to challenge the US-dominant model in countries outside the US (e.g. Reiersgord, 2021, June 17). Others have been doing that for ages, such as the well-received German Shell youth studies – a regularly recurring empirical study on the attitudes, values, and behaviors of German youth that has been conducted by sociologists on behalf of the Shell corporation since 1953 (see e.g. Shell, 2019).
Many companies are striving for genuine human-centricity these days, trying to be empathetic for their customers and employees alike. Unfortunately, these companies are achieving the absolute opposite by sticking to a birth cohorts-specific, pseudo-universal generational model that disregards culture and history.
But why do we keep reading thousands of articles and studies proclaiming how Gen XYZ was supposedly different from whatever generation? To answer this question, we must take a look at the history of the generational difference idea in the context of business.
How did we get there?
As with most ideas, they flourish well if there is enough money behind them. Tracing the roots of the generational labels we’re most acquainted with starts with the invention of the post-World War 2 “teenage consumer” in the US and the UK (Abrams, 1959).
Before World War 2, an elaborate market catering to adolescents had not been established yet in the US. It was the economic stability and prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s that produced favorable circumstances for mass consumption across different age groups. Families had disposable income to buy into their material dreams (Buckingham, 2014). The peaceful US post-war years were paired with a competitive labor-market that pushed young women out of the workforce into domestic suburbia, which led to a significant increase in birth rates – a "baby boom" (Doepke, Hazan & Maoz, 2015).
These post-war children were afforded a significantly more carefree life with fewer, less harsh economic responsibilities than previous age cohorts. More restrictive child labor practices meant that minors could stay in school longer. Parents didn’t necessarily marry them off at the age of 16 anymore. Suddenly there was a time and liminal space between childhood and adulthood – the teenage years – that could be enjoyed (Douglas, 1996).
When these adolescents were equipped with money to spend, clever marketers identified this post-war age cohort as a potent new type of consumer group – the "teenage consumer". They could be lured with age-appropriate clothes, gadgets, pop music, automobiles, fast food, and other commodities that were decidedly different from what had been offered to their parents before. And companies soon wanted to learn how they could better target this largely unknown demographic, for which they employed an armada of consumer researchers, ad agencies, and marketers (for an elaborate history see Frank, 1997).
It is disputed who can be credited with first crafting the term “baby boomer”, but it emerged around 1963 in a Newport News Daily Press article and a Salt Lake Tribune article to denote a specific cluster of birth cohorts of those born between the early 1940s through the early 1960s (Thompson, 2018, May 1; cf. NBC, 2019, November 6). The term was later manifested by the US Census Bureau (Keyser, 2018, April 6).
In the following decades, US journalists, think tanks, ad agencies, and market research companies gradually established the rather uninspiring succession of placeholder-like generation names we are still dealing with today – “Generation X” (in reference to Douglas Coupland’s 1991 similarly titled novel). The term “Generation Y” or “Millennials” emerged because the turn of the millennium was near. And “Generation Z” was obviously established because someone ran out of ideas (cf. Twenge, 2018, January 26).
Corporate players in consulting backed up the supposed existence of generations as distinct clusters of birth cohorts by publishing a constantly growing body of popular and pseudo-scientific literature. For instance, the Pew Research Center has been publishing annual generation studies for the past two decades (PEW, 2015, September 3). Nielsen (2018) has been doing the same. And so has Kantar (2022).
Soon, the birth cohort-focused generational concept was not only of interest to companies trying to market their products and services to customers. Human resources functions of organizations also started paying attention to generations in an attempt to attract and retain young people entering the workforce (Campbell, Twenge & Campbell, 2017). To give this business a tangible number – according to King’s College’s Bobby Duffy, US companies spent USD 70 million on generational consulting in 2015 (as cited in Menand, 2021, October 11), with numbers climbing steadily.
Given the size and popularity of the generations business, none of these corporate actors have an interest in debunking this house of cards that has been erected over the last 70 years, which is why they keep reapplying the artificial glue. No wonder, the cringeworthy idea of “Generation Alpha” – those born after 2010 – is on the verge (see McCrindle Research, 2021). Dan Woodman, a sociologist and scholar of generational labels, criticizes this business:
“One of the things we do with generational labels is make claims about how different this cohort is — they're so different, almost alien in their attitudes, that you need to pay some experts to come in and explain them to you” (Woodman, as cited in Pinsker, 2020, February 21).
The birth cohort-focused generations model not only spawned an entire industry of market researchers and consultants who offer their interpretations for a good fee. In fact, their pseudo-scientific findings have artificially fired up a public discourse that has all gone mad.
Are we living in a mediated age of intergenerational conflict?
If we believe the popular media, we’re in the midst of a generational war between the so-called “boomers” and “millennials”. In this discursive war, each side blames the other for the dire state of human affairs – be it the maltreatment of our planet, society, politics, the economy, or a work morale unfit for the future.
In one corner, those identified as “millennials” have been the subject of public criticism for the last decade. They have been called weak “snowflakes” and attested to an “entitlement complex” in the workplace (Alton, 2017, November 22). They’ve been labeled a “lost generation” that “don’t stand a chance” (Lowrey, 2020, April 13). A BlackRock executive even accused millennials of a general deficiency grounded in the idea that they “never had to sacrifice anything” (Zilber, 2022, March 30).
Criticism didn't go undefended. Fed up with the “gaslighting of the millennial generation” (Fisher, 2019), the blame game soon turned and the other corner was attacked. According to a Wallstreet Journal columnist, “Baby boomers” were the real culprits who “stole the millennials’ economic future” (Sternberg, 2019). The Atlantic Monthly proclaimed, “The boomers ruined everything” (Stone, 2019, June 24). A Business Insider article titled, “A billionaire boomer blames his generation for ruining the economy for millennials” (Hoffower, 2021, November 24). The Financial Times demanded, “Stop blaming millennials for all your failures” (Mance, 2021, November 26). And The Independent reported about a “new scientific study” that claims baby boomers are the new climate change villains (Sankaran, 2022, March 25). Overall, younger people started reacting to the previous actions, values, and beliefs of older age cohorts – or what they thought these actions, values and beliefs had been.
This sentiment of heated intergenerational warfare is best symbolized by the dismissive “OK boomer” phrase that has become a popular social media meme among young people criticizing any old people, regardless of the target’s actual birth cohort membership (Rosenblatt, October 29). The New York Times assessed that “’OK Boomer’ marks the end of friendly generational relations” (Lorenz, 2019, October 29). A recent sociological study concludes:
”The ‘OK Boomer’ phrase has come to represent a battle of the generations wherein Baby Boomers are fed up with the utopian demands of younger generations, while younger generations see Baby Boomers as stubbornly conservative and out of touch” (Mueller & McCollum, 2022, p. 265).
The “old vs. young” conflict constitutes a topos as old as social self-reflection itself. There’s at least a “2,500-year-old history of adults blaming the younger generation” (Gillard, 2018, April 17), including Aristoteles, Horace and other great thinkers. In fact, it seems to be a universal commonplace throughout time and human evolution that people believe “’kids these days’ are deficient relative to those of previous generations” (Protzko & Schooler, 2019, p. 1).
What is different these days, however, is the specificity at which distinct generations are proclaimed to exist, framed, evaluated, labeled, stereotyped, and turned into “the Other”. According to this logic, each generation supposedly possesses an entirely different approach to life, and also needs to be handled differently by institutions and corporate actors alike. That is not true, however, we have already established in the previous sections.
Now the question emerges: what would be a viable, social-scientifically grounded alternative to the highly questionable birth cohort-focused generation concept if “generations are an invention”, as the Atlantic Monthly once so aptly titled (Laskow, 2014, September 11)?
What makes a useful generational concept?
We are advocating for a cohorts-of-experienced-based conceptualization of generations. None of what we’re about to tell you is new, however. Ever since the publication of Karl Mannheim’s (1928/1952) seminal essay “The problem of generations”, the concept of experience-based generations has fascinated sociologists, anthropologists, historians and other cultural scholars alike.
This alternative way of reconstructing generations does not bother with fixed clusters of birth cohorts. It also doesn’t proclaim the emergence of a new generation at regular time intervals. It doesn’t even offer a universal model that can be applied "across markets" regardless of cultural context. Instead, it tries to temporalize the social conditions that shape the perception and practices of life, as encountered by different groups in different societies. The underlying idea is that big singular events as well as slow shifts generate particular experiences, which are shared and perceived in similar terms by various birth cohorts, while cutting across multiple ages.
Building upon Bude (2009), we can identify a handful of factors that help identifying and reconstructing generations:
Evidence of commonality beyond demographic structures
First of all, a meaningful concept of generations must focus on empirical evidence of commonality that goes beyond adjacent birth cohorts. As Bude (2009) states,
„Age cohorts don’t form a generation yet; it depends on the possible reference to a collective experience that coined and defined [a group] in a way that elicits the evidence of commonality, regardless of differences in provenance, religion, or ethnic belonging. Where such evidence is missing, there is no generation, even when the years of birth are adjacent” (p. 188).
It means that patterns in attitudes and practice aren’t something one distills from a predefined group. The identification of commonalities actually guides the framing and definition of a generation. Evidence of commonality that transcends basic demographic structures is to be found not just in the similarity of experience but also in the fact that it was experienced collectively – i.e. together as a group – which brings us to the next factor.
Shared transformative experience within a specific context
Second, we must be looking for defining events as well as larger, slower shifts to which a group of people is exposed. The important thing is that these people must also perceive these events in similar terms. In Bude’s (2009) words, „What turns adjacent age cohorts into a generation is the feeling of being affected in similar terms by a unique historical and social situation” (p. 187).
Expressed differently, we are looking for shared experiences that are transformative in nature – that have a tangible consequence – as they change the group’s perception of life, themselves, and/or the world around them. That takes into account, e.g., cultural revolutions, wars, economic booms and downturns, ethnicized conflicts, political power struggles, natural disasters, famines, pandemics, and groundbreaking discoveries, rather than the invention of a single consumer product or the gradual establishment of certain technologies.
On a universal level, the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis are two of those highly transformative events that keep changing people’s view of the world, public health, the environment, and globalization. The traumatizing experiences of the last 2.5 years have the potential to spawn a generation. But you can bet that the Russian war on Ukraine or the Iranian counter-revolution led by women have an even more drastic capacity on a more culture-specific local level for the people in these affected regions. This is why it is not particularly useful to formulate a generation regardless of the local human context from which they emerge.
Collective identification & demarcation
Third, people must gain a “feeling of participating in a collective perception and reaction” (Bude, 2009, pp. 188-189). A generation thus does not exist per se; it must be actively constructed through discourse, self-reflection, and collective identification. It does not suffice for other people (such as journalists or market researchers) to label a random group of people as a generation. Instead, these people must identify with one another through a shared experience, a common cause, or whatever grounds them.
Moreover, “generations are marked by differentiation from other generations” (Bude, 2009, p. 189). They are constructed through alterity – the identification and demarcation from what one is not. A common enemy or culprit usually unites an otherwise disparate band. The 1960s student protests in West Germany – also labeled “68s generation” – are a good example in this regard. Members of this student movement had a common cause – the final overthrowing of old structures from the Third Reich era – but also a common enemy – the political and economic establishment of their parents.
Problem-focused units that polarize
Fourth, generations are established around problems that affect the lived reality of a group of people – be these problems of a social, political, economic, or natural origin. Problems usually manage to mobilize people and encourage collaboration more than opportunities. Hence, “a generation forms a problem-focused unit and not a unit of solutions” (Jäger, as cited in Bude, 2009, p. 191). It can also not be assumed that these problems are interpreted in exactly the same way. Various polar opposite opinions may reside within a single generation, which is why they are shaped by elaborate debates and friction that polarizes internally.
Avantgarde groups that lead receptive groups
And fifth, what is perceived as the dominant position of a generation is often a leading voice that expresses an extreme position. This is why we can differ between a so-called “avantgarde” and “receptive groups” that engage in an “interplay […] when it comes to constructing the shared interpretive horizon” (Bude, 2009, p. 191). Think about the members of Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg who are among those young people who are taking drastic measures to counter climate change and accuse previous generations of sheer ignorance. They might be considerably more drastic in their actions than the average high schooler. The existence of extreme positions also counters the idea that all members of a particular birth cohort must identify with a single generation. It may actually span adjacent ages if a similar social reality and outlook on the future are shared among them.
Overall, we’re suggesting that we should reframe the generations concept from a social constructivist perspective and make it dependent on a range of reconstructive factors, instead of relying on intervallic birth cohorts. This way, it actually becomes possible to use the generational concept in a way that allows us to cluster different groups of people according to meaningful differences and commonalities.
Why does this matter?
This article tried to demonstrate that business practitioners need to assume a more critical understanding of the generations concept. The commercial research and consulting industry needs to overcome the birth cohorts-specific generations concept, and focus on cohorts of shared experience that are built around decisive historical events instead. It is in this way that we will unravel meaningful differences and commonalities between groups of humans in the context of time, experience, and historical development.
More than an intellectual exercise, it is the most sensible thing to do from a strategic business perspective. After all, most large companies spend significant amounts of their annual budget on trying to market their products and services to people of different ages. At the same time, they are trying to appeal as attractive employers to young people entering the workforce, while retaining the old-timers. Right now, it is fair to say that they are marketing to elusive social groups that don’t actually exist.
This issue points us to an even greater problem: A lot of market research these days is highly anti-intellectual and decoupled from expert-driven social scientific discourses (for an elaborate critique see Dr. Paul Hartley’s new book “Radical Human Centricity''). The commercial research and consulting space is dominated by many actors who lack in-depth training in the social sciences. Nevertheless, they claim to represent the social world, while disregarding the vast body of models, theories, and methods the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and the humanities have to offer. This is not just frustrating from a professional industry perspective. The proclamation of pseudo-causalities and wrong social coherences also leads to unsustainable strategic decision-making on the client side.
In an effort to be radically human centric, we are promising to do the exact opposite at the Human Futures Studio. We do not engage in bullshit research for the sake of making a quick buck. Instead, we ground our work in a rich scholarly tradition.
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